RE: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

["Christopher R. Maden" <crism@maden.org>]

At 04:32 9-09-2001, Stuart Naylor wrote:
>Reading through this I guess the main thread of the story is pro MS v pro
>Netscape.
>Personally I don't really give a damn as long as we don't get what we have
>now.
>Various browsers can accept HTML with errors and have AI to provide the
>missing gaps. The main problem of this is that the error processing changes
>from one dev house to another. This I believe contributes greatly to what I
>call NTSIAB (Never the same in another browser).
>I dislike the idea intensely of any deviation from set standards as HTML was
>a perfectly good mark-up until it was bastardised in a war of vendor
>functionality.
>I can see a major reason why a non well formed XML should return errors
>though. In respect to presenting data and URL data access then if the
>document is 'non well formed' maybe it would be better to crash out rather
>than to continue on regardless.

You may remember the dark days of 1995 when, "Well, it works on my 
browser!" was a typical Web "designer's" response to problem 
reports.  Netscape and Microsoft both claimed to be tired of playing this 
game, where a bug on one system had to be faithfully duplicated on the 
other, so that "working" documents would continue to work.  XML was 
expressly designed to fail if non-compliant so that everyone would know 
that the document was bad.

Oh, well.  It was a nice thought, and it was fun while it lasted.

-Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden, Principal Consultant, HMM Consulting Int'l, Inc.
DTDs/schemas - conversion - ebooks - publishing - Web - B2B - training
<URL: http://www.hmmci.com/ > <URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >
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